Free Astronomy Magazine November-December 2018

31 NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2018 OBSERVATORIES A phone message left for Cope at a telephone num- ber listed for his parents seeking comment was not immediately returned. After Cope could not find his laptop, the court docu- ments said, he began to act frantically and told the chief ob- server that there was a “serial killer in the area, and that he was fearful that the killer might enter the facility and execute some- one.” The obser- vatory closed, without consult- ing FBI agents, after Cope’s comments about the serial killer and his erratic behav- ior, the warrant said. The motivation reported by the Alamo- gordo Daily News (certainly in good faith) is really at the limits of credibility. The arti- cle even goes so far as to affirm that the evacuation was an initiative of the observa- tory and not the FBI. Quite incredible is the fact that it was necessary to remove twenty people from their residences for over ten days and inspect the complex of antennas, because the alleged depraved janitor, no longer finding his computer, began to rant about a serial killer in the area. The impression we have is that the sus- pected employee is the ideal scapegoat with which to cover the real motivations of the investigative operations that have af- fected Sacramento Peak. Probably, we will never know the truth, but no doubt there is already enough material to write a thriller and to turn the Sunspot Solar Ob- servatory into a movie set one day, to re- build what happened last September. The screenplay, after all, is already written. S everal wit- nesses claimed to have seen a Black Hawk mili- tary helicopter (like the one pic- tured) flying over the Sunspot area at the beginning of the FBI opera- tions on the Sacramento Peak. If, as stated by the official ver- sion given by the authorities, the action had as its objective the seizure (already happened!) of a laptop computer of a depraved janitor, is an in- tervention of that extent justified? Sunspot Solar Observatory closed from Sept. 6 to Sept. 17, but the research associ- ation that manages it has said only that an unspecified security issue was the reason for the closure. The search warrant filed last week in fed- eral court in Las Cruces said the facility’s chief observer, who was not identified, told FBI agents in August he found a lap- top computer with child pornography sev- eral months earlier but did not immediately report the discovery to authorities because he was “distracted” by an unspecified ur- gent issue at the observatory. The search warrant provided to a judge the justifications for agents to search comput- ers, cellphones or tablets owned by the jan- itor, Joshua Lee Cope, and the house trailer where he lives. An FBI agent seized the lap- top at the observatory on Aug. 21, 2018, and took it to the FBI office in Las Cruces, court documents said. FBI spokesman Frank Fisher said Thursday that no one has been charged and the investigation is ongoing. Cope, 30, lives on property owned by his parents in La Luz, the search warrant said. !